restaurants

I have to admit, as much as I adore my children, and as good as they are at eating out, it’s rare that Tony and I eat dinner alone at a restaurant and I think, “I wish the kids were here!”

But that’s exactly what I thought when Tony and I first ate at Zero Zero, a pizza and cocktail place in downtown San Francisco, and I saw their mix-and-match dessert menu. You pick a base (ricotta donut, warm chocolate cake, or sticky toffee pudding), you pick an ice cream (chocolate, vanilla, or swirl); and then you pick from the glorious toppings: hot fudge; chocolate bacon bark; olive oil and sea salt; vanilla poached cherries; chocolate-orange-hazelnut shell. It appealed to me, but I knew it would really delight the kids, and I’d been trying to think of a way to get them to this dessert ever since.

The problem is that neither of the boys really likes pizza, and I am too cheap to spend $10 a plate on the plain pasta they would likely order as an alternative. I considered taking them for brunch, but couldn’t imagine letting them order dessert after an order of deep fried French toast with caramel bananas. You see my dilemma. I bided my time, hoping the right opportunity would arise eventually.

It took a few years, but recently the planets aligned just right. Friends of the boys had slept over, and the kids had all enjoyed their typical breakfast followed (after some LEGO spy games) by a big waffle and fresh fruit brunch. Then we all headed downtown to the California Historical Society’s exhibit on the Golden Gate Bridge (which you really shouldn’t miss). We went over to Yerba Buena Gardens afterward to run around, walk through the MLK, Jr. Memorial, and climb trees.

The boys’ friends went on home with their parents at that point, and we found ourselves downtown in the late afternoon, a bit hungry, not ready to head home yet. I remembered Zero Zero. “Salads and dessert?” I suggested to Tony. And off we went.

The boys read peacefully while Tony and I had cocktails.

We all ordered salads: Caesar for Eli and Tony; mixed greens with shaved artichokes, fennel, green olives and herbs for Ben and me:

And after that, felt free to go to town with the dessert menu. First Ben:

Ben's menu choices

And then Eli:

Eli's all-chocolate dessert selection

They ate happily, of course:

At various points along the way, our plan could have gone awry: the restaurant might have been closed, or crowded, or the kids not interested in salad, or unable, after the busy day, to sit and make salad a good meal. But the planets aligned for us in that way, too, and our time at the restaurant just capped off a lovely, rare day, so I didn’t even mind when I asked Eli to share a bite and he laughed and answered like this:

Like most families, our family’s road trips have usually meant packing a cooler and handing sandwiches and snacks over a shoulder into the back seat, stopping only for quick gas and bathroom breaks. Traveling with kids, you hesitate to break the rhythm of a trip; sure, sometimes when the kids were much younger we had to stop because someone was screaming or wet (or both) but more often the kids would get into a good groove with a book or a nap and we’d hate to break the spell. So we’d forge on, sometimes late into the night. But on our recent trip to Santa Barbara, a couple factors made the idea of road trip restaurant stops more appealing. We were spending a day longer in Santa Barbara than usual, and we were staying with family, cooking most of our meals together, so schedule + budget = meals on the road.

I have some fond memories of childhood road trip restaurant breaks. Most often, it was a stop, on the way to my grandparents’ house, at The Red Rooster (cheeseburger deluxe, fries and a root beer float); sometimes, I went with my grandfather when he drove my grandma to a weekend retreat, and we’d stop at Friendly’s along the way (fried clam roll for him, grilled cheese for me, shared fries and a chocolate fribble).

These days we’re keeping up The Red Rooster tradition in my family (happily, it’s about halfway between JFK and my parents’ house now) and our drive to Santa Barbara usually involves a quick stop at The Madonna Inn. The boys love the amazing grotto bathroom, and somehow manage to resist pieces of cake bigger than their heads in favor of a cookie or chocolate from the sweets counter. We get a treat, run around the parking lot for a few minutes, and then continue on our way.

This time, we stopped at the Madonna Inn for lunch. It’s an ornate room — floral carpet, red leather seats, pink cloth napkins, carved wooden walls — and the menu is enormous. The kids, a little overwhelmed, ordered breakfast for lunch and were perfectly happy; I ate an egg salad sandwich which tasted just fine. The service is lovely and the atmosphere — maybe from all that pink? — is really warm and friendly. It’s a kind of kitschy place but it made us all very happy, and we were on our way in under an hour, feeling much more relaxed than if we’d eaten in the car.

On our drive back home, Tony used TripAdvisor to find a restaurant in Paso Robles, Panolivo, which I discovered, later, is a favorite of a local writer friend (always nice to have that confirmation). The boys ate giant salads, Tony had an excellent house-made veggie burger and a glass of wine, I had salad and a delicious hummus plate. We talked and lingered and picked up pastry on the way out the door.

I’m sure we won’t always stop and sit down to eat when we’re making road trips, but, like our gradual move away from kid’s menus, this is a development that’s definitely improving our family food life.

When Lisa told me about her family’s road trip plans, I was envious (the sun! the stars! the Missions! the meals!) and then, instantly, dubious on the one point she was nervous about herself: the meals. Two weeks of restaurant meals. Forty-two restaurant meals. With two kids. At (among other places) several theme parks.

Let me back up. We eat out a fair amount. Tony and I ate out regularly before we married (we both did growing up, too), and it was important to us to cultivate good restaurant habits in our kids. So we were strategic about it. Ben’s first restaurant meal, I have to admit, was at Chevy’s; he was about 7 weeks old and gazed at the balloons while I drank a margarita. Success! His first fancy restaurant meal, months later, was at Lulu, a place we chose partly for its delicious menu but also for its volume: we figured a crying baby wouldn’t be heard over the din. We needn’t have worried; he was old enough to sit in a high chair and gnaw happily on baguette, while we enjoyed several courses.

We continue to be thoughtful about eating out and follow the same practices as Lisa’s family. We eat out at fancy places to celebrate, sometimes, (both kids have eaten at plenty of places that don’t offer high chairs or kid’s menus) but more often we walk to one of the many local spots in the neighborhood where we can afford (both in terms of environment and price) to experiment. So if, as happened once when Ben was a toddler, there’s a meltdown between ordering and the food arriving, it’s no big deal to flag down the waiter and get dinner to go. Luckily, it’s been a long time since such an evening has gone awry; more often, we eat and chat and it feels quite a bit like home, just a little more special. But the kids’ preference, always, is to eat at home: it’s more relaxed, they don’t have to wait for their food, they like our cooking.

This summer, we’ve traveled a bit but managed — by booking hotel rooms with kitchenettes or staying with family — to keep the restaurant meals to a minimum (on our visit to Seattle this June, just the second restaurant night made Eli mournful). Tony researched spots that looked good — Italian and Asian restaurants tend to offer a good variety for our choosy, vegetarian kids — and we’ve been eating well. I’ve been remembering the mom I used to be, who would sweep the fragile glassware into the middle of the table, far from a toddler’s grasping reach, or who would set the high chair far from the tempting tablecloth. I’m grateful for older kids who (mostly) sit politely and use the kid’s menu now (mostly) just for drawing.

Kid’s menus certainly offer a welcome landing spot, a sign — as surely as highchairs and lidded cups — that the restaurant welcomes kids, and we’ve been grateful for them. But honestly, the kid’s menu has never offered a great selection for my kids; of the standard burger-fish sticks-chicken fingers-pizza-pasta quintet, most are either too meaty or too cheesy for my kids. So we have always looked beyond it, and are now really moving away from it. Eli will just eat a big salad (particularly Caesar, the gateway salad) if there’s nothing else on the menu he likes, though still often augments with pasta or grilled cheese. Ben, however, is making some new choices. Recently at our favorite local place, he passed up his beloved pasta “shoulders” (a toddler malapropism of his we have all adopted) in favor of a new dish: soba with grilled tofu and greens. It’s the kind of dish he eats all the time at home but would never order out. He’s also not shy about ordering exactly what he wants. He’ll scan the menu and assemble himself a meal from side dishes, he’ll order a salad without that cheese or with that other salad’s dressing (I know special orders can be a nightmare for a kitchen staff, and we always check that they don’t mind). At our most recent meal out, I noted how the water goblets stood a little unsteadily on thick placemats atop the marble table, turned down the waiter’s offer of plastic, lidded kid’s cups, relaxed and ordered a glass of wine. They are growing up and I am enjoying it.

I was lucky to become a mom surrounded by a group of neighborhood friends who were also new moms, and before Ben turned one our frequent casual playdates and regular Monday playgroup generated a babysitting co-op that saved my family, at least, from paying for babysitting until Eli was a baby. These days, with the kids all in school, we don’t use the co-op much anymore, but we do a regular sleepover swap with one of the families which we all look forward to every month.

I’ve been realizing lately that part of what the kids love, aside from the big block of playtime with their friends, is the food. Their friends’ house always has a particular Kashi cereal that I can never remember to buy; their mom cooks chard somehow differently than I do (I need to ask her about it!), and Ben and Eli can’t get enough of it. Over here, their friends love my buttermilk waffles. In the morning, we’ve fallen into a good routine of cereal breakfast (which the kids serve themselves independently) followed, a couple hours later, by waffle breakfast. The recipe is nothing revolutionary — straight out of the Joy of Cooking — but it’s delicious and feeds a crowd of hungry, LEGO-building, spy-sneaking children.

Whisk the wet ingredients into the dry and mix together with a few swift strokes. Spoon 1/2 cup of batter (or whatever is recommended by your waffle iron’s manufacturer) into the hot iron, close the lid and cook until golden brown. Repeat with remaining batter until the children are full. (Leftover waffles make excellent snacks.)

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“A child should be encouraged, not discouraged as so many are, to look at what he eats, and think about it.”